A Constructive Interference-based flooding mechanism - using hardware-generated ACKs - is proposed to achieve highly reliable source-to-sink communication of very short critical packets in a wireless sensor network working in harsh environments. Constructive interference is only achieved if the senders synchronize their packet transmissions with sub-microsecond accuracy. In order to achieve the required synchronization accuracy, the packet retransmissions at the relay nodes are triggered by using hardware acknowledgements.

Abstract In this paper, we propose a method for evaluation of the bit error rate (BER) for packet combining based on constellation rearrangement (CoRe). Such mapping diversity scheme, adopted in the high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA), uses Gray‐mapped constellations and is based on suboptimal accumulation of the reliability metrics generated in each of the transmissions. We present an exact model for the logarithmic likelihood ratios (LLR) obtained by means of the so‐called max‐log approximation, and we show that their conditional probability density functions (pdf) are piecewise Gaussian. We then present the derivation of the uncoded BER and illustrate it with simulation results that confirm our formulation. Finally, we propose simplifications which significantly reduce the complexity of the evaluation method and provide results with a very good accuracy; an extension to transmissions over faded channel is also presented. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Exact evaluation of the bit- and symbol-error rates in a 2-D constellation has closed solutions for particular modulations and/or bits-to-symbol mapping. To solve this fundamental problem of digital communications, we propose a general method which yields the exact results for arbitrary modulation symbols' set, arbitrary bits-to-symbol mapping, and deals with the case of nonuniform signaling. These three conditions define any digital transmission using memoryless modulation, so the proposed method is a general tool solving all problems tackled in the literature, under constraints imposed on one or more of the parameters defining the modulation or signaling type. Such an evaluation tool is of practical importance during the design of the modulation. Our analysis and numerical simulations show the advantages offered by the new method when compared with the bounding techniques.

Exact evaluation of bit- and symbol-error rates in a 2-D constellation is a fundamental problem of digital communications, which only for particular modulations and/or bits-to-symbol mapping has closed-form solutions. Here, we propose a general, numerically efficient algorithmic method, which yields the exact results for arbitrary modulation symbols' set and arbitrary bits-to-symbol mapping, and which deals with the case of nonuniform signaling. These three conditions define any digital transmission using memoryless modulation, so the proposed method is a general tool solving all problems tackled in the literature under constraints imposed on one or more of the parameters defining the modulation or signaling type. Such an evaluation tool is of practical importance during the design of the modulation. Our analysis and numerical simulations show the advantages offered by the new method when compared with the bounding techniques

The exact closed-form expression for the bit-error rate (BER) of rectangular quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is given. The presented formula is independent of the bit mapping and it is thus particularly useful in the design and analysis of modulation schemes employing non-Gray mapping. Compared with the so-called expurgated bound and the union bound, our expression is shown to accurately predict the BER in the low signal-to-noise ratio range where the bounding techniques fail.

Exact evaluation of the bit- and symbol error rates in two dimensional constellation is a fundamental problem of digital communications which has closed-form solutions for particular modulations and/or bits-to-symbol mapping. In this paper we propose a general method which yields the exact results for arbitrary modulation constellation, arbitrary bits-to-symbol mapping and deals with the case of non-uniform signalling. These three conditions define any digital transmission using memoryless modulation thus, our method is a general tool solving all problems tackled in the literature under constraints imposed on one or more of the parameters defining the modulation or signalling type. Such evaluation tool is of practical importance during the design of the modulation. Through numerical simulations we illustrate the advantages offered by the new method when compared to the bounding technique.